Winter Is Cooked: It’s getting not only warmer but wetter.

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2024/12/winter-rain-climate-change/680876/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=the-atlantic&utm_content=edit-prom

by theatlantic

2 comments

  1. Winter is getting not only warmer but wetter, Zoë Schlanger writes.

    “This winter most places in the U.S. should expect less snow than what many people—and the historical record—would consider normal,” Schlanger reports. “Cold streaks are shorter, freezing nights are fewer, and extremely cold days are just not as cold. The places with the most dramatic warming,” such as Albany, New York; Concord, New Hampshire; and Burlington, Vermont, “are also some of the country’s classic winter wonderlands.”

    Last winter, researchers identified a “snow-loss cliff,” an average winter-temperature threshold above which snow loss happens fast. Justin Mankin, a climate scientist at Dartmouth who contributed to that finding, lives in New Hampshire, an area well off that cliff, meaning each additional degree of temperature rise dramatically diminishes snowpack. 

    When Schlanger spoke with Mankin, there was fresh snow outside his window, which was in line with climate predictions. What is changing is any kind of consistency; the snow system will get far more jumpy with each additional degree of warming. “Snow just doesn’t have the reliability that it has had in our imagination from the 20th century,” Mankin said. “That’s just gone.”

    The likelihood of extremely wet winters is actually rising, but because temperatures will be higher, much more of that precipitation will fall as rain. One climate scientist based in Chicago warned of more winter flooding to come. Parts of the U.S. that rely on snowpack for water may face water-security challenges. In the Northeast and Midwest, research “points to a less concrete loss, of ice fishing and pond skating and dogsledding, and other parts of life that just aren’t as possible in a sopping wet, muddy winter,” Schlanger writes. “The identity of these places will continue to vanish as long as the global temperature keeps going up, which it will until carbon emissions halt.”

    Read more here: [https://theatln.tc/22kM66o0](https://theatln.tc/22kM66o0) 

    — Evan McMurry, senior editor, The Atlantic

  2. I can’t say anything yet because winter isn’t even here, but so far it’s been pretty damn warm and wet in Northern BC.

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